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Sorry For the Detainment, Here's a Laptop
A select group of 17 Uighur Muslims held in Guantánamo, and waiting for a nation to grant them asylum are getting laptops and web training from the US military. Their web training will take place in a virtual computer lab the military has set up. The lessons will be limited to DVD language training as well as a basic users skill — set to help in any future employment options. Nury Turkel, an Uighur rights activist, said the training would help the men "be reintroduced into a modern society," adding that it "also would give hope to the men that their freedom is nearing." This special group already gets to order fast food and use a phone booth for weekly calls. I think the government is on to something here. Nothing keeps a man pacified like an occasional phone call, a cheeseburger, and surfing for a little porn.
an occasional phone call, a cheeseburger, and surfing for a little porn
I dunno. I can only eat, chat, and fap so much. But I could play CivIII day and night.
I can see the fnords!
Nothing keeps a man pacified like an occasional phone call, a cheeseburger, and surfing for a little porn.
Tell my boss that. He won't let me surf porn or make personal calls at work. Cheeseburgers are alright though.
For those not in the know, these prisoners are a tough case. The Chinese don't want them back (they're nasty separatist rebels to them), and they don't want to go back to China as it is for fear of waking up one morning with a bullet in their heads. They really don't belong in Gitmo -- they're not full-on Al Qaeda. Nobody in the US wants to grant them asylum because they're former gitmo detainees. The last thing the US wants is to release them to somebody like Yemen or Saudi Arabia, where they can become full-on Al Qaeda. A US judge said they have to be released, but didn't specify to which country. This whole thing is just a mess...
As waterboarding wasnt giving enough answers, they changed tactics and now are giving them laptops with Windows ME and Microsoft Bob. I'm sure there are international laws against that inhuman methods of torture.
If they don't mind being treated a little worse than a terror suspect they could get corporate IT jobs.
Or it could be a plot by the US government to create an army of disgruntled, economy destabilizing gold farmers in WoW.
These people are not considered terrorists. That's why they have to be released sooner rather than later.
They are currently being held because they can't go back to China, and they haven't yet found a place that can give them asylum.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
So Castro's like an abusive, jealous spouse? Cool.
Per your question, RTFA or google a bit. If TL;DR, then the take away is that they're from western China and are already members of a persecuted minority. They'll all but certainly be killed if we send them back to China. No one else wants them, or if you read into it a bit, perhaps other countries enjoy leaving us between a rock and a hard place ethically.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
I think a lot of people there are detained as POW. They are not terrorists, they simply lived in a country and were part of an army that the USA decided to invade.
Despite the judgment of your own court to release them...hmmm
What exactly makes them terrorists - being in Gitmo?
Do yourself a favor and never do anything - anything at all - that might make anybody suspicious, because you know just the suspicion is enough to make you actually guilty.
Let's see - shelter, fast food, phone access, and now computers. Yep, I'd say that makes their living conditions better than just about every homeless person in America. This must make the millions of recently unemployed Americans feel ever so special. Sorry to be cynical, and I have virtually no idea if these guys actually pose a real threat or not, but am I the only one that thinks prisoners should be put to work to offset some of that tax money being wasted on keeping them alive?
One laptop per terrorist!
Mod me down you wonderful bastards, it's called comedy!
So they are in the Star Wars forums then... (Im just joking please don't hurt me)
"Coalition military intelligence officials estimated that 70% to 90% of prisoners detained in Iraq since the war began last year 'had been arrested by mistake,' according to a confidential Red Cross report given to the Bush administration earlier this year." http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0511-04.htm "In February, an American military official disclosed that the Afghan guerrilla commander whose men had arrested Mr. Dilawar and his passengers had himself been detained. The commander, Jan Baz Khan, was suspected of attacking Camp Salerno himself and then turning over innocent "suspects" to the Americans in a ploy to win their trust, the military official said. The three passengers in Mr. Dilawar's taxi were sent home from Guantánamo in March 2004, 15 months after their capture, with letters saying they posed 'no threat' to American forces." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/asia/20abuse.html?ei=5088&en=4579c146cb14cfd6&ex=1274241600&pagewanted=all
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Give a terrorist the tools and knowledge to conspire against us with people around the globe, instantly. What could possibly go wrong?
And herein lies the problem with my dumbass countrymen. So obnoxiously opinionated with an inversely proportional knowledge of the subject at hand. Guess you hadn't heard that we've already released hundreds of innocent "terrorists" from Gitmo?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
So now we've got people who are angry at us. Boo-fucking-hoo. Someone's going to have to man up and take responsibility for the problem. Or you can continue to be a pansy-ass and keep innocent people in prison because you're a fucking coward.
The girls I see when I surf porn don't look like virgins, at all
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
I welcome them to my neighborhood - there's 4 houses on my block that are empty now. Even if they only fill one, that's one less house being used for covert teenage sex and drug use or being decorated with spray paint as "turf". It puts a few people willing to work in my neighborhood, which is lacking a few, and could possibly even raise the value of my property in the long term as having an occupied house next door looks much better than having a burned out husk, because someone started a fire with a pipe or a cookstove. There's a few places nearby hiring ($8/hr, but it's a job), and in a few years, they could be chasing the American Dream at full speed. So again, yes, move them into my neighborhood. The house payment + utilities is almost certainly less than what debt we're racking up on them in GITMO.
Truck driver, plumber, Linux systems engineer.
What about the countries they originally came from? Do they not want them back? Why? Or is it that they don't want to go back? If so why?
Oh, most of their countries of origin would love to take them back. Then throw them into jail and torture them. In the specific case of the 17 Uighurs, the country of origin is China. We all know how much China likes members of ethnic minorities, especially if said members were in Afghanistan and could have been subject to terrorist training. The Wikipedia article got a bit of background information on the topic.
The Guananamo Uighurs are also a subject of discussion in e.g. Germany. While the possible threat of terrorism is generally assessed as non-existant, the German government tries hard to avoid any quarrels with China. Granting asylum to these detainees would certainly stress the diplomatic relationship between the two countries.
or let them go.
And in what country do you propose to deposit them?
The United States of America, of course.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
"Coalition military intelligence officials estimated that 70% to 90% of prisoners detained in Iraq since the war began last year 'had been arrested by mistake
The calculation in my .sig is based on the assumption that error rates amongst the detainees are no greater than those made by American police officers who shoot the wrong person when discharging a weapon after arriving at the scene of an altercation. That left-wing America-hating organization, the NRA, has done research to document that the cops shoot the wrong person about 10% of the time, as opposed to Real Americans, who shoot the wrong person about 2% of the time.
Of course, given the "fog of war" and the incentives to use non-judicial detainment as a way of getting back at your enemies, the probable fraction of innocents in Guantanamo is much higher. And to the anonymous coward who claims below that we can't infer anything about the fraction of innocents in Guantanamo Bay based on the astonishingly high fraction of innocent detainees in Afghanistan: what are the judicial procedures employed by American forces to ensure guilt prior to incarceration in Guantanamo?
Many centuries of blood-soaked history have taught us that a public and speedy trial by a judge who is applying more-or-less clearly defined laws is the only thing that is remotely likely to protect the innocent accused from zealous cowards who would otherwise see them punished without trial. No one who is in touch with reality at all can think that there are not many innocents in Guantanamo Bay, and anyone who loves America and the principles for which it once stood should be clamouring to have everyone either tried in public in the normal American system of courts, or released.
Advocating anything else is evidence of a profound hatred for everything that once made America a great and admirable republic.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
775 prisoners have been delivered to Guantanamo. Of these, 420 have been released without charge already, and of those that remain only 60 to 80 actually have pending charges. The rest will be freed (once there's somewhere to put them). So, if anything, the accuracy of imprisoning people in Guantanamo is actually worse than general picking up of people in Iraq, not better.
There is not a real problem here. I'm a former refugee (along with my family), lived with tortured persons, and families of political prisoners and know there are international laws and conventions that define what to do when you have people not welcomed in their own country. This false problem is because the US don't have the political will to apply those conventions after the mess they have created.
Personally, I'm willing to have these people in my neighborhood. The biggest threat to my safety I perceive is from vigilantes bent on finding and killing them, not the prisoners themselves.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
They've been detained for years with only the companionship of other males... for the most part, I'd wager that these are non-fucking terrorists.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
"DVD language training"? Shouldn't that be "DVD-based language training"?
"DVD language training" sounds like there is a special language called "DVD", presumably composed of very long strings of 1's and 0's...
RTFA. They are Uighurs (an ethnicity). Chinese government policy (China is their home country) is to execute them on sight.
It only makes you wonder why we won't send them there if you're an idiot.
They fled China to escape persecution, and were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and so wound up at Gitmo.
China has no problem with us sending them back, we have a problem with handing them over for summary execution.
These ARE FUCKING TERRORISTS what don't you get?
These people have not been convicted of anything; many of them were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Would you want them driving your taxi cab? Flipping your burgers? Digging up your main sewer line?
Why wouldn't I?
You fucking bleading heart liberal socialists need a quick lesson in The World in the 21st Century. It is US against them.
"F*cking fascists" (to use your own words) like you need a quick lesson of The World in the 20th Century, because attitudes like yours brought us two world wars and genocide.
On the other hand, Islamic terrorism is insignificant; for all its fireworks, 9/11 simply wasn't a significant contributor to mortality in the US even in 2001. People (like you) who try to create irrational fear because of 9/11 are helping the terrorists, both by destroying our liberties and by ascribing more power to terrorists than they actually have.
The US will not win the war on terrorism by force or jailing people. The only way we can win is through justice and compassion.
Nice non sequiter there. Of the "70% to 90%" who were picked up, almost all of them were cleared and released immediately. Those detentions have nothing at all to do with Gitmo.
The article you are replying to said: "...were sent home from Guantanamo in March 2004, 15 months after their capture, with letters saying they posed 'no threat' to American forces." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/asia/20abuse.html?ei=5088&en=4579c146cb14cfd6&ex=1274241600&pagewanted=all "
Did you not actually read the article you're responding to????
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Just because the Military chose not to prosecute does not mean these were sweet villagers minding their shops and tending their gardens when "inaccurately" picked up.
They were caught with weapons in hand in combat or with large weapon caches.
Not really.
In the wake of 9-11, the approach taken was that if it wasn't clear sure whether somebody was a terrorist or not, it was prudent to detain them and try to figure it out the details later.
I can understand this attitude-- it's the "better safe than sorry" approach. It's not the way we do things in the US normally ("I'm not sure if this guy is a criminal or not, so let's arrest him until we can figure it out" wouldn't be allowed by any police force in America), but I can't say that I don't understand the reasoning.
But the consequences of that way of operating is that many, or possibly most, of the people picked up actually aren't terrrorists.
(and the downside of that is that, although they may not have been terrorists before they were detained, five years in Gitmo may very well have changed their attitudes... so "better safe than sorry" may actually make us unsafe, and definitely sorry.)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
They were caught with weapons in hand
How surprising is it to find Afghani males with weapons?
or with large weapon caches.
Again, how unusual would that be in a tribal country that has had no effective national government since the early 1980s?
Hell, if the USA were somehow occupied, the same could be said of many USAsian households (in the south particularly).
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Pot, kettle.
A lot of the people in gitmo are there because we paid some tribal lord a bunch of money for 'taliban soldiers' and they rounded up whomever they didn't like. So yes, Jamal the goatherder is not a terrorist.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
What would you do if some bunch of foreigners rolled into your country and started acting like occupiers? That's right, you'd shoot them.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Ever hear of refugees? Is it strange that persecuted people from a brutal dictatorship would head to a country that practices their religion?
... hard core killers.
No, they were turned in by people who claimed they had weapons or who claimed that they were terrorists. If you started handing out cash in South Central L.A. for "known criminals," and you had no way to check their record, what do you think is going to happen?
Tribes turn in other tribes, just as in the slave trade days. It's one of the reasons a nation cannot dominate that region of the mideast - because they are not nationalists. Tribe and religion will always trump whatever flag is planted in the capital.
In actuality, these men were found on the battlefield participating in attacks on the US,
If someone invaded my country, I'd be on the battlefield participating in attacks against whoever it was. Its like saying the French Resistance in WWII was a terrorist organization, and was generally unlawful. The only time your allowed to fight an invading military force is if the invaders recognize your legitimacy.
I'm not sure of the reason every singe detainee is there, but I have heard that there was some amount of them who were "enemy combatants", which is a different thing than a terrorist. An "enemy combatant" is a POW who is not subject to the Geneva Convention because they are called "enemy combatants".
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Simple shooters were either shot or imprisoned locally.
To persist in your dream world you have to explain why only A FEW were sent half way around the world.
Talk to someone who has served in country. If you can refrain from insulting them long enough to actually listen to what they tell you.
These were not shop keepers. Get over yourself.
Served in country, lead ground patrols, cleared buildings, and called in aerial strikes in and around Fallujah as part of the 1st MEF portion of Operation Vigilant Resolve. Our platoon commander filed numerous reports and we have combat video documentation of almost all combatants that we captured. I doubt anyone that we captured was sent to Gitmo. Most were scrawny, under trained kids defending what they thought of as their home.
It's pretty fucking simple. Either you have evidence to prosecute those in Gitmo or you do not. I believe in our Constitution, have fought and bleed to protect it. It says all men are created equal, not all men except those we call terrorists. If we can't produce a report, a video, a witness, a letter, or anything that shows those men in Gitmo are terrorists, then why the fuck are we still holding them? Just because they hate us? I missed the part of the Constitution that lays out the principle of jailing people just because they hate you. And I'm pretty sure that actions such as those we are taking in Gitmo are some of the very same actions (Re: British imprisonment of dissenters) that led to our founding fathers forming a more perfect union.
We have become that which our founding fathers despised.
That's only if you use an obsolete form of the Geneva Convention. The post-WWII GC RTPOWs (which pretty much all countries recognise; to which the US is also a signatory, though not a subscribing party - it wasn't ratified by the US senate) afford POW status to irregular combatants, who take up arms against an occupying power.
These protections were brought in precisely to cover people like resistance fighters, as the grand-parent says.
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